


The Butcher and the Beast

by glorious_spoon



Series: Wolves Without Teeth [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Dubious Consent, M/M, POV Outsider, POV Outsider on Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski, Rescue, Rituals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-27
Updated: 2018-04-27
Packaged: 2019-04-28 16:23:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14453127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: "Yeah," Stiles snaps, peeling his shirt off and flinging it aside, leaving him bare to the waist. He digs into his pocket and comes up with a bone-handled penknife, pulls it open. “Yeah, Scott, I’m sure, so if you don’t want to make this experience even more emotionally scarring for everybody than it’s already going to be, you should probably get the hell out of here, now.”*Stiles, Scott, and Liam rescue Derek from being ritually sacrificed, but if they can't figure out how to disrupt the spell, they're going to have a feral werewolf on their hands.Fortunately--or maybe not--Stiles has a plan.





	The Butcher and the Beast

They find him at the back of the temple, buried in rubble. Glinting shackles circle his wrists and ankles, the chains snapped off, attached to nothing, and his face is slack and still beneath a layer of yellowish dust. Stiles is there first, dropping to his knees, pressing his fingers against Hale’s throat to check for a pulse that Liam can hear from ten feet back. His shoulders relax visibly when he finds it. “He’s alive.”

“We know,” Liam says impatiently. Scott cuts a glance at him, but he ignores it. “Can we all get out of here before the rest of the ceiling collapses?”

“It’s not going to collapse,” Stiles says, with an infuriatingly offhanded confidence. He doesn’t stand. His hand moves from Hale’s throat to his face, thumb tracing the curve of his cheekbone, and Hale shifts, a low, almost subsonic groan escaping him. “Hey, Derek. We gotta stop meeting like this.”

Liam drifts nearer, sticking close to Scott. He doesn’t really know Hale that well, beyond that one tense trip down to Mexico, the memory of which is mostly bathed in blood and panic and the moon’s pull. He doesn’t remember Stiles ever even talking about the man, and definitely not in a way that squares with the tenderness in his touch or the overwhelming relief in his scent. Or the fact that he was the one who dragged them all out to the desert in the first place on barely more than a hunch.

An accurate hunch, as it turns out.

“Go,” someone whispers, and it takes him a second to realize that it’s Hale. His voice is cracked and dry, his eyes still closed. “Go. Now.”

“Yeah, man, we’re going,” Stiles says, and pats Hale on the chest. “Just as soon as we get you out of this— Scott, you wanna help me out here?”

“Sure,” Scott says, but before he can take more than a step, Hale jerks, his eyes flying open, glowing blue, his mouth opening in a wolf-toothed snarl.

 _“Go,”_ he growls, and it’s deep, resonant, the overlapping tones echoing off of the walls until Liam’s ears ring. Scott freezes.

“What,” Stiles says quietly. He hasn’t moved, hasn’t even rocked back on his feet, but his shoulders have tensed back up. “What is it?”

Hale shakes his head. “Ritual… wasn’t completed. Needs a sacrifice. Unbonded pair.”

Liam has no idea what the hell that’s supposed to mean, but Scott does, by the way he blanches, eyes going huge.

He hates when Scott looks like that. Scott is supposed to know what he’s doing. Scott is supposed to be in charge, he’s supposed to have a plan, he’s not supposed to get them all trapped in a ruined temple with an incoherent, out-of-control werewolf spouting about ritual _bullshit._

“Shit,” Stiles breathes. “I knew this was too easy.”

“I’m the bait,” Hale rasps, his eyes falling shut again. “You have to get out of here. Before…”

“Are they coming back?”

“Won’t… need to,” Hale mumbles. He’s going slack again, his words slurred, like his mind is slipping off the edge of a steep cliff. “Knew you’d come. They knew you’d come. Runes on my back. It’s me…”

“Derek,” Stiles snaps. There’s no response. Hale is barely breathing, doesn’t react when Stiles pats his face, or when he slaps it sharply. Stiles swears under his breath, then turns back toward them. “Scott, help me get him turned over. I need to see what they put on him.”

Liam hangs back as Scott approaches, his nerves gone tense and singing even though there’s no threat visible. Just a ruined temple and an unconscious werewolf and the two people who are supposed to know what’s going on smell like fear. It’s almost worse than watching berserkers stomp out of the shadows toward him; at least then he’d have something to fight.

 _Almost_ worse.

Scott has to shift a pile of rubble before they can get Hale turned on his belly, his chained hands twisted awkwardly beneath him. Something is painted across his skin in jagged dark ink. Words, Liam thinks, but not in any script he recognizes. Stiles must, though, because he’s scanning them with his lips moving, his expression growing more and more unhappy as he reads. After a few minutes, he pulls out his phone and checks something on it, looks back at the marks, then sits back on his heels and swears explosively.

“What?” Scott asks. “Stiles, what is it?”

Stiles drops his head, rubs a hand over his face, then touches Hale’s shoulder gently and stands. He opens his mouth, then glances at Liam and leans close to Scott, mouth almost to his ear, says something in a bare whisper. Try as he might, Liam can’t catch more than a couple of words. _Feral_ is one of them, though, and that makes a trickle of ice go down his spine. He takes another step back toward the door.

“The bond?” Scott asks quietly, and Stiles nods. “I can’t let you do that.”

“Not your choice,” Stiles says, low. “What, you want to kill him? Because that’s the only other way this goes down, and you know it. We can’t contain him. Not here. And he’s gonna wake up any minute.”

“We could call Deaton—”

“ _Deaton’s not here,_ ” Stiles snaps. “He’s not going to make it here in time. This is the only option, and you know it.”

“Derek is never going to forgive you for this.”

“Yeah, well, at least he’ll be alive for it.” Stiles glances over at Liam again. “Okay. You both need to get out of here before he wakes up again.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“Then you can come rescue me when I start screaming,” Stiles says, with a bare hint of a grin. “But I’m not wrong.”

“Stiles—” Scott looks pained, which is how Liam knows that he’s going to give in. That, and the fact that Scott always gives in to Stiles eventually. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Stiles snaps, and he’s— oh, god. He’s peeling his shirt off and flinging it aside, leaving him bare to the waist, like that’s a perfectly normal thing to be doing right now. He digs into his pocket and comes up with a bone-handled penknife, pulls it open. “Yeah, Scott, I’m sure, so if you don’t want to make this experience even more emotionally scarring for everybody than it’s already going to be, you should probably get the hell out of here, _now._ ”

There’s a shift at their feet, the rising drumbeat of a heartbeat speeding. Hale. He’s waking up. Scott looks down at him, breathes in, then out, then nods. His eyes flare red, blazing, and his claws scrape the floor. He heaves himself up, a dark mass of uncoiling muscle and _power_ , and his order is wordless but Liam still can’t do anything but obey. His feet beneath him and the cold floor, the scent and the sound of his alpha drowning out everything else. The lone wolf doesn’t move, and neither does the human beside him, who stinks of fear and determination.

He doesn’t come back to himself until they’re outside the temple next to the Jeep, the sun burning down on them, a scorching heat. Scott is standing with his arms folded tightly over his chest. He’s wearing his human face, but his head is tilted like he’s listening for something Liam can’t hear.

“What just happened?” Liam asks.

Scott flinches and doesn’t look at him. “Nothing.”

“Yeah right. You totally just pulled rank on me. Alpha rank. What the hell, man? You never do that.”

“You would have argued,” Scott says, but he sounds uncomfortable. “We didn’t have time for that. I’m sorry.”

“Where’s Stiles?”

“Inside.”

“You left him in there? We just left him in there with Hale? I thought you said he was going feral.”

“Stiles knows what he’s doing,” Scott says, but there’s a tenseness to his mouth that belies the confidence in his words.

“And what the hell _is_ he doing, exactly?”

“Trust me,” Scott mutters, “you don’t want to know.”

Liam opens his mouth again, but before he can speak, the air is split by a rising howl. A werewolf howl. It’s coming from the ruin, so it has to be Hale, but it doesn’t sound like any howl that Liam has ever heard from a wolf before. There’s a desperate quality to it that chills him to the bone, and he rocks forward without even thinking about it.

He and Stiles aren’t really friends. He’s not even sure he likes the guy half the time, but he’s not leaving him or anyone else alone with a werewolf that sounds like that.

He gets all of two steps before Scott’s hand shoots out to grab his arm in an implacable grip. “No.”

“What do you mean, no?” Liam stares at him. “You heard that, right?”

“I heard it.” Scott’s face is ashen. He looks sick, but his grip doesn’t loosen. “We’re not going in there.”

“Why not?” Liam yanks his arm away and stares at him. “He’s your best friend, isn’t he?”

“He is,” Scott says. “But we’re still not going in there.”

“Well, why the hell not?”

Scott looks back at the looming bulk of the building, a pale behemoth of crumbling stone silhouetted against the hot blue sky. Then he sighs, turns his back to it deliberately, and sits down on a mound of stone that had maybe, in another life, been a wall. “Sit down.”

“What?”

“Just sit down, Liam,” Scott says, with an edge to his voice. It’s not quite a command, but it’s not far off, either. Liam sits. He keeps his head tilted toward the temple, but all he hears is silence. He doesn’t know if Scott, with his alpha senses, can hear more. If he does, he gives no sign of it.

Liam opens his mouth, shuts it. Fidgets, fingers scraping the rough stone, then says, in a rush. “You have to tell me what’s going on. Please.”

“Derek…” Scott looks down at his hands. “There’s a reason they took him. It’s a ritual sacrifice—”

“Yeah, I _heard_ that, so what—”

“Would you just let me finish? It can’t be just anybody. There are rules— look, if you want to know how the spell works, ask Deaton when we get back. Or maybe Stiles would know, I don’t know— look, anyway, we thought they just wanted Derek. We were wrong.”

“He was the bait,” Liam says slowly. “For Stiles?”

“Yeah. They need both. Werewolf and human. Predator and prey.”

“So we need to get them both out of there before—”

“Stiles has a plan,” Scott interrupts repressively.

“ _What_ plan?”

Scott looks back at the ruin, then down at his hands, then sighs. “I can’t tell you that. You’re just going to have to trust me. Do you trust me?”

Liam looks up at his tense face, at his hands that are twisting anxiously together, then back at the silent temple. No one is screaming. He’d hear it, if someone was screaming. Either Stiles’ plan is working, or he’s already dead. Scott wouldn’t let that happen. He knows that down to his bones. “Yeah, okay. I trust you.”

“Good,” Scott says, with a hint of a smile.

“So what do we do now?”

Scott glances back at the temple again, then determinedly away. “Now we wait.”

* * *

So they wait. It’s scorchingly hot out, and it doesn’t take long for Liam’s t-shirt to be completely soaked through; he’s probably just lucky he’s got werewolf healing now, or he’d be sunburned right through the thin cotton. He can’t help glancing back at the temple every couple of minutes, but Scott is as still as a statue, frowning down at his hands in his lap.

He doesn’t know how long it is before he hears it. Not that long, probably, in the grand scheme of things: fifteen minutes, maybe, but it feels like forever.

It’s a soft noise, a scrape of stone, and then footsteps. Two sets of footsteps. He squints back at the temple to see two shapes emerging. They’re moving slowly, tilting against each other, one supporting the other, but they’re both vertical.

Scott is out of his seat and halfway across the space between them before Liam can even move, bracketing the limping— and oh, great, Liam realizes abruptly, totally fucking _naked_ — figure of Derek Hale on the other side, taking some of his weight from Stiles.

“Did it—”

“Yeah, obviously,” Stiles interrupts. He’s still shirtless, his chest smeared with quickly-drawn symbols in what looks like blood, but he seems otherwise uninjured. “Since I’m not dead. Let’s get him to the Jeep.”

“‘M okay,” Hale mumbles as they approach. His head lolls onto Stiles’ shoulder and he leaves it there, nose buried in the crook of his throat, breathing in slow and deep.

“Oh, sure, you’re okay, you definitely look like you’re okay,” Stiles retorts, but he doesn’t try to shove Hale off of him. On Hale’s other side, Scott shakes his head. His face looks softer now, relieved, and Liam feels himself relaxing. At least until they get close enough to smell.

The blood he was expecting. Stiles is covered in it, and Hale might have healed but he was still injured. So, sure, blood. Blood and sweat and dirt, and the cold sharpness of prepared wolfsbane, all of that makes sense. There’s another smell, too, though, an earthy, salt-bitter musk that it takes him way longer than it should to identify, mostly because it’s the last thing he was expecting to encounter here.

Stiles isn’t looking at him, but he catches Scott’s eyes, and gets a slight head-shake in return. Out loud, he just says, “Liam, can you get the door?”

“Uh,” Liam says, and then, because it’s pretty much the only option, “uh, okay.”

He pulls open the back door of the Jeep. Scott and Stiles awkwardly tumble Hale’s body into the backseat. He goes without protesting, but then he catches Stiles’ wrist with one hand, tugs at it, still dazed. “Stiles. _Stiles._ ”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, soft. He leans into the touch, ducking his head, and now Liam can see a perfect ring of human-looking tooth-marks at the base of his neck, and reddish fingerprints blooming just above the waistband of his jeans, and yeah, he’s pretty sure he knows exactly what Stiles was just doing back there, and also, _what the hell._

Scott give him another glance, like Liam’s silent freak-out is getting on his nerves but he’s too polite to say anything (or possibly just too polite to mention out loud how Stiles and Hale both reek of come), and then Hale sinks against the seat with his eyes closed and Stiles steps back, scrubbing both hands through his sweaty hair. “Well, that was an experience.”

“How are you?” Scott asks quietly.

“Surprisingly non-traumatized, actually,” Stiles says, and rubs at the bite on his neck. “I’m okay. We’re both okay. Can we not discuss this right now?”

“You don’t have to talk about it, but we can both smell it on you,” Liam says before he can think better of it. It’s been a stressful day, and his impulse control has never been all that great, so, whatever. “What the hell kind of ritual was that?”

Stiles drops his hand and stares. “Oh my god. Seriously?”

“What? You hang out with werewolves all the time, that can’t be a surprise.”

“Liam,” Scott says, sounding exasperated.

“Oh my god,” Stiles says again. “Okay, thank you, now that we’ve all established that werewolf senses are as creepily invasive as ever, can we please get out of here? Because I’m pretty sure Derek still needs medical attention, and I _know_ I need a shower.”

“You really do, dude,” Scott says, half-apologetic. “I wasn’t going to mention it, but…”

“I hate you both.” Stiles shoves his keys into Scott’s hand before yanking open the backdoor and crawling in next to Hale, fitting himself into the spaces of the werewolf’s body like there’s nowhere else he belongs. Hale makes a low noise in his throat, but doesn’t really stir. It’s not entirely clear if he’s actually still awake, and he is still _very, very naked_ , so Liam is kind of trying not to look at him too much. “You’re driving.”

Scott laughs at that, clear and bright, twirls the keys around his finger, and looks over at Liam. “I guess this means you get shotgun. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

“Um,” Liam says, and shifts his weight. He thinks about arguing, about demanding more of an explanation, and then he looks back at where Stiles and Hale are tangled up in the backseat and decides that actually, he really doesn’t want to know. And Scott is right. This is his first and probably his last chance to ride in the front seat of the Jeep, and he is definitely not climbing in the middle of the cuddlepile in the back. He circles around the front bumper and climbs in, pulling the door shut behind him. “Okay. Let’s go.”


End file.
